9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design

SEO: time-intensive, ever changing, and highly misunderstood. Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design.

If you’re a designer, are your designs really search friendly?

A lot of misconceptions about SEO still exist in the web design community and many designers, who have at least some knowledge, are often acting with outdated information. Once a designer understands the value of SEO, there is still the concern of how to keep a design attractive, while also being search friendly.

Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter. In that spirit, I’ve put together a list of 9 SEO tips that help keep your stunning website optimized for search engines.

1. It’s not the same old SEO
SEO can be hard to keep up with, because it is always changing. Today, SEO doesn’t mean a site has to be ugly.

2. Links talk
Links tell search engines what pages are about.

3. Design is linkbait
Great design improves credibility and the user experience.

4. Look at search bots as browsers
Considering a search bot as a disabled user or another type of browser, is exactly the type of approach needed for search friendly web design.

5. Smoke some hash
# The hash mark creates an element in the URL that is not considered unique by the search engines, so it is dropped.

6. Use SEO friendly JavaScript
Any time you touch technologies like JavaScript, you need to tread carefully

7. Flash is OK, sometimes.
Ask someone who casually follows SEO news, and they’ll tell you flash can now be crawled.
BUT . . .
* Do not include an entire site on one page.
* Do not use flash as the navigation.
* Do not include important content in flash.

8. CSS image replacement
CSS image replacement is one way to make a site look great, while also being search friendly.

9. Have great linking with footers
If you have a design that will be compromised by the inclusion of a robust navigation above the fold, a solid footer is a great solution.

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Using SEO and Social Media Marketing Together

When a website is listed or bookmarked in one of the social media sites, other users can grade the site and its content. This validates the importance of having relevant and informative copy.

As users comment on blogs and articles, they can add their own links, and increase traffic to their sites. One important component of media marketing is commenting on other sites and becoming active in online communities.

As people visit a site and like what they find, they pass the link on through their own social media sites. This is termed viral marketing. When a site, video, or article goes viral, it means it’s being promoted all over the Internet through people visiting it.

Think of it as a beneficial sort of gossip. One person tells ten friends that a site has something exciting, those ten friends tell ten friends each, each of the 100 new friends tells ten more. A site can be promoted exponentially, much as a virus replicates, hence the term viral marketing.

Launching an Online Media Marketing Campaign

When launching am online media campaign, the first thing to consider is branding. A site should reflect its brand every time it is mentioned, every place on the web.

Another important aspect is to consider what the customer or user of the site needs and wants. When a site meets those needs with relevant articles that reflect the keywords and SEO terms that clients use in a search what happens? It goes up in the search engine ranking.

Invest time and thought into the campaign. Define the goals of what the website needs to be successful, and keep those goals in mind when social networking online. Become educated in search engine strategies and implement them into the campaign. Others are working hard to do the same, and knowledge is today’s competitive edge.

In conclusion, SEO needs social media just as social media needs SEO. For a business to thrive online, the webmaster must become expert in both, and utilize both on a regular basis. Success happens when a site goes viral and finds itself on the first page of the major search engines. The marriage of SEO and social media produces better results than either can alone.

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55% of Search Marketers Plan to Increase SEO Spending this Year

While the recession may be hurting the search engines’ revenues, it’s apparently not having an affect on the spending habits of search marketers.

According to the latest UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report from Econsultancy, search marketers plan to increase their spending this year.

Highlights include:

• 55% of UK search marketers plan to increase their SEO spending this year.
• 45% plan to increase their paid search budgets
• 49% plan to include Twitter in their marketing efforts–up from 3% last year–and 65% are including Facebook.
• 48% are seeing an increase in ROI from their SEO campaigns (compared to 6% that have seen a decline) and for paid search, 43% have seen an increase (versus 15% that have seen a decline)

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Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success

Now more than ever, company marketers are charged with improving performance with fewer resources and shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital tactics like SEO and social media. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to the ability to attract links for improved SEO.

Making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics can be accomplished with a roadmap that identifies the audience you’re after, the goals you’re trying to reach (and can measure) as well as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan. Read on to get a better understanding of how SEO and social media complement each other and a step by step guide for creating a social media roadmap.

Social media roadmap

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing.

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect.

By involving SEO insight in a social media marketing effort and vice versa, marketers, public relations professionals and advertisers can extend the value of their investment. Well optimized social media content marketing efforts can attract new network participants via search. News content that experiences distribution via social news and bookmarking channels can facilitate links to company website content directly and indirectly. Advertisers that fund social media campaigns can continue to realize the traffic benefit from keyword-optimized interactive content long after the campaign has ended.

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6 Tips to Optimize for Twitter Search

With social media and search fusing together, what does this mean for SEO? In other words, how do you optimize a site to perform well on a social “search engine” like Twitter?

1. Keyword research is still important
2. Brand yourself and your Twitter profile
3. Build relationships and get more followers
4. Add to the conversation and be engaging
5. Start viral marketing campaigns
6. Add links and multimedia where appropriate & use Twitter as a marketing channel

Twitter SEO is a lot like email marketing. Your first priority is to develop a solid relationship with
your followers by offering interesting and useful content. Once you have that in place you can add your own links and promotional marketing to drive sales.

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SEO: 63 % of people look only at the first page of results

According to Marketing Sherpa, almost 134 million people in the U.S. regularly use search engines when looking for information online. Of that number, 63 percent look only at the first page of results--at most. Search engine marketing includes search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising–to work for your business.

Search Engine Optimization
SEO encompasses the strategies for earning top rankings in free search engines. The goal is to optimize your site so search engines will consider it relevant.

• Find the hottest keywords for your market
• Plug keywords into the right locations in your copy and code.
• Use keywords that relate directly to your content.
• Keep the spiders coming back with frequent new content
• Integrate your keywords as naturally as possible into your copy.
• Collect links from other sites that are considered reputable and relevant.
• Use a site map to boost your ranking in Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live Search

SEO should be at the core of your overall internet marketing strategy. It’s one of the most inexpensive and effective approaches available.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click ads that appear when people search using the keywords in the ads and you pay when people actually click on your link.

• You only pay for results
• PPC ads show up immediately.

With a combination of PPC and SEO you can make sure your target market will find you. No other set of strategies offers you so much scope as search marketing.

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SEO 2.0: Social Media Bag of Tricks

In 2004 the term “Web 2.0″ was originated by O’Reilly Media. The “2.0″ means that this is the second generation of Web usage. Web 2.0 has created a variety of new and innovative ways to promote Web sites using social bookmarking, social networking, blogging, wikis, RSS Feeds and video feeds. These all allow and encourage user interaction, thus the term “social” is often involved.

The advent of Web 2.0 created new opportunities for Web site operators to gain traffic and search engine placement for their sites. Using the right techniques, and avoiding common pitfalls, can help build traffic for your site and gain it higher placement in search results.

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Most Small Businesses Fear Search Engine Marketing

If you’re a traditional small business chances are you realize the potential benefits the Internet can possibly bring. You’ve spent years building your in-store sales and spent countless hours working on plans to drive foot traffic to your store. But what about online? You know the opportunity is there, but something’s holding you back. 

A good majority of small businesses are still weary of creating a presence online mostly because of fear of the unknown. Worse, many of these small businesses are lost when it comes to online marketing. They need help with understanding marketing to the online crowds. According to a new survey by Microsoft, more than half of all small businesses with an online presence aren’t doing any kind of paid search marketing because of a variety of reasons.

The survey goes on to report that those small business that ARE doing paid search marketing are actually very satisfied and happy with their results (higher than 70 percent).

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Interested in learning how Search Engine Marketing can benefit your business, contact us!

Six Neglected SEO Tips That Can Save Your Business Big Bucks

Every marketing tactic gets more scrutiny when budgets face the severity 
of a struggling economy. Marketers are increasingly responding to the 
accountability found in digital marketing, placing their budget toward 
efforts that they can clearly measure against. Put SEO under this 
microscope, and it consistently delivers. 

1. Eliminate Navigation Bars

2. Check Your Code

3. Go for Quick Wins

4. Meta Info – Describe yourself

5. Optimize Your Keyword Platform

6. Be Reachable

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Twitter as a search engine

Twitter has held the attention of the web. While the premise is simple — briefly answer the question, “What are you doing?” — the benefits are numerous.

Some users share the minutia of their day. Others promote projects they’re working on, while others connect with far-flung friends, seek help to puzzling questions or simply “eavesdrop” on the informal thoughts of people they admire.

Here are some advantages of using Twitter over Google as a search engine:

It doesn’t interrupt workflow

High quality results

Pose a question in real English

Results based on knowledge, not SEO skills

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